There is so much pressure put on kids today to be perfect or more than perfect. Even a 4.0 isn't good enough anymore; you've got to take advanced placement classes to boost your GPA even more. You play one extracurricular sport? That's nice, but you should play other sports, and volunteer at the homeless shelter on your weekends off, and work a job, and have a million friends, and...
Enough! I hypothesize that the rising rates of anxiety in teens and adults in America is at least somewhat if not heavily influenced by all this pressure to be perfect.
“Recent generations have been told over and over again: You can be anything you want to be, you can have the big job title, you can have the big bank account, and in the case of women, you can have the perfect body. That puts a lot on a person’s shoulder – and it is also not really true. That disconnect creates a lot of anxiety about how hard you need to work and a deep fear of failure.”
– Dr. Twenge, SDSU
NEWS FLASH: Not everyone is going to be a doctor, a lawyer, Miss America, or a rock star. Not everyone is going to go to an Ivy League school or play Division I athletics. Not everyone is going to get a full-ride to their dream school.
And you know what? That's okay.
It's okay to be better at certain things than others, and furthermore, it's okay to be bad at some stuff. As long as you are trying your best, that is all that matters. You don't need to do everything perfectly and you shouldn't feel anxiety over that fact.
As a coach, I see a lot of the spillover and frustration in athletes when they try to learn something new. As any athlete knows, when changing something in your technique, you tend to take a step back before getting to take several steps forward. It seems that there is such pressure to be perfect that athletes now have trouble when they can't do something perfectly the first time they try. I love to see an athlete who isn't afraid to mess up, though that is becoming rarer by the day.
In order to improve, you have to mess up a whole lot before you get it right, and then you have to mess up a whole lot more until you can do something consistently right. It's the nature of sports and learning as a whole.
Are there some super-gifted athletes out there who find things come easily to them? Of course there are, just like there are people who are geniuses. For the vast majority of the population, though, embracing failure as part of the learning process seems to be a hard pill to swallow.
I know young athletes especially tend to focus on their errors. They only think about that one shot they missed and not about the 10 others they made. I find myself reminding athletes constantly that messing up once is not a big deal. To all the athletes and learners out there, I say this:
Embrace failure.
Fall down seven times, stand up eight. It is part of the learning process. It is in fact necessary to fail, at least a little bit, before you succeed. Stay focused, embrace the learning process, and work hard.
My motto is that the most important point of the game is the next one.
